I feel as though I am confident in almost all situations at this point in my education. I feel like we cover so many topics, and in such depth, that we are prepared for just about anything. That being said, I feel as though I am the least confident in situations where communication is not clear between the athlete and myself or situations where I cannot make sense of what an athlete is describing. There have been a few cases this semester where, for lack of better terms, I have wanted to pull my hair out because an athlete was not communicating with me or was not making sense during an evaluation. It makes me less confident in the evaluation itself as I feel that the diagnosis is not a solid as it could be if the communication and understanding was there. Above all, these situations just frustrate me and especially so if I cannot come to a clear decision. My most confident situations tend to be in emergency care situations as the facts of that section of knowledge have been reviewed so many times that I feel as if it is a reflex to react to those situations.

This semester I have not had the opportunity to do a very in-depth therapeutic rehabilitation or plan for a patient.​ This semester I was supposed to have had the opportunity to help design and carry out a rehab plan for an athlete with a shoulder injury, but said athlete decided to do his/her rehab at an offsite physical therapy clinic. The best example of carrying out something such as this probably comes from my strength and conditioning project with our client. Though the project is for Advanced Strength and Conditioning and is supposed to be focused on the aspects for the class, a huge part of our project has been on the rehabilitation side for his injury. We created a plan to address his hamstring issues that includes strengthening, stretching, mobility work, and anaerobic capacity in order to address the issue. We are constantly reevaluating and tweaking as we go in order to make the fastest progress possible. The overall goal of the project for us is to allow our client to return to his competitive running time and speed without any hamstring pain. We did baseline testing to determine what areas we wanted to work on and decided to focus on glute and core strength while working on overall flexibility (mostly in the posterior chain). As of now, we are exactly in the middle of the project and will be performing our tests again to assess our progress thus far. We have a daily journal that we and our client post to in order to keep things very up to date. As of now, it appears that we have made great progress, but still have a lot of work to do and some variables to shift. Our goal at the end of the next 3-4 weeks is to completely negate the pain and have him back to his competition speed. When the project is all said and done, I will be able to use it in similar future cases as well as how I will go about future rehabs such as this in order to produce the fastest and best outcome that is physiological process.

I would like to reflect on my goal of: expanding my knowledge of evaluation skills and executing of special tests in order to become more accurate in diagnosing injuries. I feel like I have definitely made a lot of progress in this category of my goals. Being with the football team has allowed me to have a ton of opportunities to perform clinical evaluations. In doing so, I have gotten a lot of practice with the special tests and diagnosing a variety of injuries with accuracy. I have also gotten comfortable with the hip, a section that i struggled with severely last year and was nervous about coming into this year. I believe the independence with evaluations has pushed me to be more analytical and pick situations apart more in order to come up with my ideas and how I should proceed in an evaluation. As for my other goals, I am on track with my goal of completing my clinical question research in the Month of November. My goal of completing 10 masteries per week has slacked as of late. I started off strong early in the semester with filling out everything I did and getting signatures, but I have not been doing so well with it lately. I have a lot of attempts and masteries that I can get credit for from both clinical experience and PBL's, but I need to fill them out and get them signed. I feel like I am in a more comfortable position with attempts and masteries this semester than the past two, despite slacking as of late.

My Journals

Each week, the students in our Athletic Training Program are required to post a journal entry. These can be typed our video recordings. Each week we focus on a different topic relating to clinicals, research, EBP, classes, or life in general. We are also graded through our websites, so if you notice any weird notes or things that do not make sense it is probably part of an assignment. Take a minute to check them out!